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      Salvatore Sciarrino Returns to Myth in the Opera ‘Venere e Adone’

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      Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Venere e Adone,” his 15th opera, premieres this weekend at the Hamburg State Opera.When the baritone Evan Hughes agreed to sing the part of the wild boar in Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Venere e Adone,” premiering at the Hamburg State Opera on Saturday, he didn’t expect to become the star of the show.In most opera versions of the Venus and Adonis myth, like John Blow’s “Venus and Adonis” (1683) and Hans Werner Henze’s “Venus und Adonis” (1997), the boar is silent or eliminated. But in “Venere e Adone,” with a libretto by Sciarrino and Fabio Casadei Turroni, the boar, or the Monster, is not just a singing role — he is the moral core of the story.In this version of the myth, the Monster, who has five solo scenes, doesn’t mean Adonis harm. The creature has been hit by one of Cupid’s arrows, and instantly falls in love with the boy hunting him.“I said yes to the project before I even really understood that the Monster was a sympathetic character,” Hughes said in an interview. “He only becomes violent because of the outside world.”Salvatore Sciarrino, a composer of stage scores that are intimate, fragile and sparse.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesIn an interview at his home in Città di Castello, Italy, Sciarrino, 76, said he considered the Monster to be the most human character in “Venere e Adone.” At the beginning, the Monster sings from a sort of existential limbo, unsure of who he is or what he wants. When he kills Adonis, who is hunting him, the Monster thinks he is caressing and kissing the most beautiful creature he has ever seen. Instead, he is mauling him to death.“What is life for you is death for another,” Sciarrino said. “It is one of the keys to being in the world.”“Venere e Adone” will be led by the Hamburg State Opera’s music director Kent Nagano and staged by it artistic director, Georges Delnon. It is the first Sciarrino production that Nagano has conducted, and although Delnon has known the composer for about 25 years, this is their first collaboration on a new opera.The project began when Turroni, 59, a writer and former tenor, approached Sciarrino with a draft libretto based on a version of the Venus and Adonis myth by the Italian Baroque poet Giambattista Marino.Sciarrino and Turroni began meeting frequently, often at a bar near the train station in Bologna, to shape the text together. (Drunk people can be useful sources of literary inspiration, said Turroni, who also works as a bartender in Bologna.) Over several months, they adapted it to the needs of the music; the final performance libretto was extracted directly from the score.Evan Hughes, left, as the Monster, and Scotting in a rehearsal for the opera.Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times“Venere e Adone” broadly follows the contours of the myth. Venus, the goddess of love, has descended to earth to be with Adonis, enraging her husband, Mars. Adonis wants to prove to Venus that he is not just handsome but also strong, so he makes a plan to go hunting. Venus discourages Adonis; petulantly, he ignores her. In battle, the boar sinks its tusks into Adonis’s groin.In Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Adonis is transformed into a flower by Venus as a memorial to his short-lived beauty. In Turroni and Sciarrino’s version, both the beauty and the beast who kills him are transformed into this flower, becoming one with nature and each other.“Venere e Adone” is Sciarrino’s 15th opera. His first, “Amore e Psiche,” also based on a mythical theme, was completed 50 years ago. In these works, Sciarrino has honed an unmistakable theatrical style: intimate, fragile and sparse, with clearly audible text.While some artists go through distinct periods, Sciarrino has spent his career pursuing his peculiar brand of beauty. “I don’t really see a radical departure or sudden burst of experimentation that’s taken place over the years,” Nagano said in a video interview. “Rather, I would say that it’s a deepening and perhaps refining of a language so that it speaks in evermore poetic ways.”From left, the conductor Kent Nagano, the director Georges Delnon and Sciarrino at the Hamburg State Opera.Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times“It is impossible to hear a human voice and remain indifferent,” Sciarrino once told the Brooklyn Rail.He added: “Using the voice means employing simultaneously two forces, words and music. Singing without words is nonsense, like making a car without wheels.”Unlike opera composers whose orchestral music reflects both the conscious and unconscious emotions of the characters, Sciarrino writes instrumental parts that summon their environment. In “Venere e Adone,” there is little accompanying music at all. Furtive echoes, forlorn bird calls and windlike breath sounds evoke a naked earth.“The music of this opera is very dry,” Sciarrino said. “There are not so many sounds in this world, because it is an empty world.”In “Venere e Adone,” the vocal music is also restrained. The singers intone the text quickly while sliding downward with their voices, or hold long, clear notes that blossom into brief melismas.The countertenor Randall Scotting, who plays Adonis, compared “Venere e Adone” to an Emily Dickinson poem. “There’s so much in it,” he said, “but you have to think about it, interpret it, bring your own things to it in order to understand it.”Sciarrino’s vocal style can be challenging for singers. The Canadian mezzo-soprano Layla Claire, in the role of Venus, spent so much time walking around her house while practicing rapid Italian phrases that her two young daughters started repeating fragments of the libretto.Delnon’s production aims for the artificiality of Baroque opera.Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times“Once I started listening to Sciarrino’s music, I realized it was a language I didn’t speak,” said Hughes, the baritone. “As I started to work on it, I felt the same way that I felt at the beginning of studying, singing, learning a language that I really didn’t understand, like trying to sing in Russian.”But Sciarrino’s vocal style isn’t completely unfamiliar. He is fascinated by the art and music of the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque periods. The walls of his home are covered in paintings, including a 17th-century depiction of Adonis and his mother Myrrha by an anonymous Venetian artist.Sciarrino himself almost became a painter. The influence of Renaissance and Baroque art will be palpable at the premiere of “Venere e Adone.” Delnon and his team have hung historical depictions of the Venus and Adonis myth in their rehearsal space at the State Opera, adapting the stylized gestures from the paintings to the stage. The set designer, Varvara Timofeeva, and the costume designer, Marie-Thérèse Jossen, are developing sleek, minimalist interplays of black, white, gray and blood red.Like Baroque opera, “Venere e Adone” uses a chorus, but to ambiguous ends.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesDelnon is aiming not for psychological realism, but for the artificiality of Baroque opera in his production. “You stage it in a way that you’re not trying to be the character,” he said, “but just trying to show the character.”“Venere e Adone” also includes music that sounds explicitly Baroque. For Scotting, it is the rare work where his early and contemporary music come together. “There’s this thread of antiquity that ties into it all,” he said.Sciarrino also uses the Baroque trope of a chorus that narrates and comments on the action. But while operas from that era often use the chorus to superimpose a neat moral on the story, Sciarrino deploys the vocal ensemble to more ambiguous ends. “Venere e Adone” concludes with a question: “Who triumphs, love or death?”Here, the Monster is redeemed by those universal forces. “It’s as if Sciarrino is saying that the Monster is almost rewarded,” Delnon said, “and Adonis is punished.”Sciarrino said the question was intentionally absurd and unanswerable. But, he continued with a laugh: “To tell the truth, love always wins. Or what we call love. That is the power of the word.” More

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      Review: ‘Stranger Love’ Premieres at the Los Angeles Philharmonic

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      The premiere of Dylan Mattingly and Thomas Bartscherer’s six-hour opera was presented by the orchestra — an institution at an inflection point.The composer Dylan Mattingly’s cheeks turned red, and he held a hand up to his eyes, as he began to cry late Saturday night during the bows for the world premiere of his opera “Stranger Love.”It was an understandably emotional moment. “Stranger Love,” created with Thomas Bartscherer, had been in development for over a decade and performed piecemeal, but was now being presented in its entirety at Walt Disney Concert Hall, by the perhaps the only orchestra that could do it: the Los Angeles Philharmonic.That’s because “Stranger Love” is a six-hour, durational opera, an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small. It requires the kind of pipe-dream planning that many institutions shy away from, but that has been characteristic of the Philharmonic.Characteristic in large part thanks to the work of Chad Smith, the orchestra’s chief executive and one of its longtime administrators, who said last week that he would leave Los Angeles for the Boston Symphony Orchestra this fall. That news followed another recent blow: the announcement that the Philharmonic’s superstar maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, would depart for New York in 2026.The Los Angeles Philharmonic is now at an inflection point. At stake is the preservation of an ethos that has made this orchestra the kind that can throw its ambition, and deep pockets, into projects like John Cage’s outrageous “Europeras” at Sony Studios; regular commissions at the length of symphonies and full evenings; and “Stranger Love,” whose first act alone is as long as Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” (also programmed there this season), but which doesn’t have a fraction of its marketability.So, as Mattingly cried onstage, his triumph felt bittersweet, with a tinge of fear about the Philharmonic’s next phase. “Omnia mutantur,” someone says in the opera, nodding to Ovid: Everything changes. Yet it’s also natural to want more from the Smith-Dudamel era — to “tarry a while” and “linger in this moment,” to pull another line from the show.No matter what happens, “Stranger Love” deserves life beyond its one-night-only run at Disney Hall, which was hosted by the Philharmonic and performed by Mattingly’s ensemble, Contemporaneous. The most natural fit in New York, where epically avant-garde opera has all but vanished from earlier bastions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lincoln Center, would be the Park Avenue Armory, the city’s most generous promoter of large-scale work.If anything, the Armory would be a more appropriate space than Disney Hall, its vastness able to accommodate Mattingly’s musical and emotional sprawl — the way his score does nothing but linger, luxuriating in the good and the bad, the spiritual and the doubtful, and above all the ecstatic.The largely abstract opera follows a pair of lovers: Tasha, sung by Molly Netter, and Andrew, sung by Isaiah Robinson.Craig T. Mathew/Mathew ImagingLike most works of extreme ambition and magnitude, “Stranger Love” isn’t perfect. When it name-checks the likes of Anne Carson and Octavio Paz, it behaves more like creative nonfiction than opera and yanks its audience from an experience of pure feeling. Some stretches of the score are more trying than transporting, and the second act seems destined to torment any director.That 80-minute act — in which singers exist more as instrumentalists than traditional characters — certainly appears to have stumped Lileana Blain-Cruz, an imaginative, effective director who wasn’t in full control of the material here, or much of elsewhere. There were references, in her modest staging, to the work’s lineage of opera and durational art. In Matt Saunders’s scenic design, a tall backdrop (made of threads that formed a canvas for Hanna Wasileski’s projections) was at one point illuminated with Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s celestial, forced-perspective set for “The Magic Flute.” As if playing off an “Einstein on the Beach” reference in the line “These are the days my friends,” Blain-Cruz has two people carry and sit in chairs that could have been used in Robert Wilson’s original “Einstein” production.That’s far from the only tip of the hat in “Stranger Love,” but it may be the most explicit. Mattingly has internalized a wealth of musical styles: the gamelan-influenced, West Coast sounds of Lou Harrison; the propulsive cadences of John Adams; the vocal technique and poetic dramaturgy of Meredith Monk. Three female voices — Holly Sedillos, Catherine Brookman and Eliza Bagg, often employing woodwind-like vocalise — could have been pulled from a Minimalist ensemble.But Mattingly doesn’t quote. Instead, his influences surface subtly, abstracted in, say, a rhythmic gesture. In the end, the language is entirely his own. Although his score often instructs singers to “sound as beautiful as possible,” his writing calls for the directness of pop rather than an operatic color. His 28-piece orchestra includes restless percussion and three pianos: one with standard tuning, one roughly half a tone lower, the other in between. The microtonal effect, in Mattingly’s polyrhythms, can be that of a gently melodic choir of wind chimes.The plot is narrated by an otherworldly character named Uriel, played by Julyana Soelistyo.Craig T. Mathew/Mathew ImagingIn each scene, Mattingly prolongs a musical idea with mantra-like focus, relishing and delicately transforming it. Bartscherer’s poetic and slim story follows a couple, Tasha and Andre, through the seasons, a vague timeline guided more by mood than chronology: fresh, promising spring; pleasantly lethargic summer; suddenly shifting autumn; suffocatingly glacial winter. This general arc is narrated by Uriel — a charismatic Julyana Soelistyo, whose otherworldliness is emphasized in Kaye Voyce’s costume design — and accompanied by two allegorical figures, Threat from Without (temptation) and Threat from Within (doubt).David Bloom conducted Mattingly’s pitfall-ridden score with a sure hand. Occasionally, his hips betrayed an urge to groove, but even then he remained unflappably precise. As Andre, the tenor Isaiah Robinson had a bright purity that served the score with an egoless instrumental timbre similar to the soprano Molly Netter’s Tasha. As the Threat from Without, Jane Sheldon sang with birdlike leaps redolent of Monk’s “Atlas”; Luc Kleiner, as the Threat from Within, was gloomier and darkly seductive.Blain-Cruz’s production featured six dancers, who during the first act are made to behave with unpredictably fast and slow stylized movement that snaps into focus only when Tasha and Andre spot each other and sustain eye contact from across the stage. But in the second act, the dancers merely retell the lovers’ story through Chris Emile’s tiresomely obvious choreography.Most impressive were the members of Contemporaneous, which Mattingly founded with Bloom while students at Bard College. These are players well versed in Mattingly’s idiom, and well suited to take on such an immense, difficult score for one night: exact and detailed, but also lively and openly dancing, as full of personality as any singer.They are the stars of the purely instrumental third act, repeating versions of earworm phrases for about 20 minutes. As the score ritualistically stretches a kind of communal love to the cosmos, one melody begins to spread out as well, until, in the final seconds, it unfurls slowly, ending before it reaches its last note.And why should it? When something is this special, you can’t help but want to tarry a while and linger in the moment.Stranger LovePerformed on Saturday at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles. More

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      This ‘Magic Flute’ Has Ringtones, Bird Tracks and a Foley Artist

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      Supernatural happenings, curses and romances, heartbreaking arias and vocal fireworks — what’s not to love?Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”), a wildly popular gateway opera, has been a frequent presence on stages since its premiere in 1791. It’s a fair bet, though, that Simon McBurney’s production, which opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, is the first to feature a ringtone duplicating the bird catcher Papageno’s five-note musical trademark. Or to use about 100 speakers strategically placed all over the house.Morley (Pamina) and Brownlee (Tamino) rehearsing “Die Zauberflöte.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe tenor Brenton Ryan, as Monostatos, in the production.Lila Barth for The New York TimesFor McBurney, the use of technology is less about embracing the present than about nodding to the creation of “Zauberflöte.” That was at Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, which was run by the multitasking Emanuel Schikaneder, the opera’s librettist and originator of the role of Papageno.“Schikaneder had the latest ways of making thunder, he had machines make the sound of rain, he had bird calls, he had people making the sound of horses’ hooves,” McBurney said in an interview. “The use of sound creates a magical world, and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”The juxtapositions of intimacy and cosmic scale, simplicity and complexity, low and high technology have long been emblematic of McBurney’s work as a founder and artistic director of the London-based theater company Complicité. Audience members at his solo show “The Encounter” (which had a Broadway run in 2016) experienced the production through earphones, immersing them in sophisticated soundscapes. Something that could have added distance between performer and theatergoer brought them closer.Morley rehearsing with the orchestra, which is raised almost to the level of the stage.Lila Barth for The New York TimesMcBurney experimented with sound again for “Zauberflöte,” which was first staged in 2012 at the Dutch National Opera and has been presented around Europe. (It replaces the 19-year-old Julie Taymor production at the Met; her abridged, English-language version for families remains in the repertory.) A distinctive trait of McBurney’s “Zauberflöte” is the importance of the sonic environment.“For a forest scene I have five or six bird tracks that I can send out, a running brook that I’m going to put in a speaker in the far right side of the stage, two tracks of wind blowing in trees,” Matthieu Maurice, a sound designer, said at a recent rehearsal.The singers are amplified through body microphones, though only for the spoken sections — plentiful in “Zauberflöte,” which is a singspiel, a numbers show with dialogue between arias. The mics are turned off for the sung parts, requiring constant adjustments by two sound mixers.“There’s so much more I can do with the dialogue with a mic,” said the soprano Erin Morley, who plays the pure-hearted princess Pamina. “I can face upstage, I can whisper something. I’m sure there will be some purists out there who will hate this, but the important thing is that we are not singing with mics.”The director Simon McBurney at the Met. “The use of sound creates a magical world,” he said, “and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesNathalie Stutzmann, this production’s conductor, was also on board. “In a house as big as this one, it is obvious to me that we need to use modern technology,” she said. “The Met is huge. It’s a lack of intelligence not to adapt to a space. It’s normal to help the singers fill the space when they are speaking. It’s also important that the volume of the spoken parts match the volume of the sung parts in an opera like this one, otherwise it feels like two different works.”Amplification also allows the integration of a live Foley artist, Ruth Sullivan, who operates out of a self-contained space, visible stage left, that looks like a zany inventor’s laboratory. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said of Sullivan. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance in the same way Nathalie Stutzmann is dancing with the singers, trying to make the cellos and the voices work together.”The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects to live projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesHabermann’s drawing adds to the projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesStutzmann works as closely with Maurice as she does with the musicians and singers. (The associate sound designer, he has been implementing Gareth Fry’s original vision for the past eight years, while adding flourishes of his own, including the ringtone.) The sound effects are indicated on the sheet music, so she knows exactly what to expect and when.Adding to the increased interconnection among the opera’s moving parts, the pit is almost level with the stage.“We decided, ‘Let’s raise the orchestra, let’s make people aware of the players,’” said Michael Levine, the set designer. “Because we’re so used to the players being hidden, and they weren’t in the 18th century.”From left, Luka Zylik, Deven Agge and Julian Knopf as the three spirits that guide Tamino and Papageno.Lila Barth for The New York TimesDuring the spoken sections at rehearsal, players in the orchestra turned toward the stage like flowers to the sun. They could watch the action for a change.“There’s nothing more boring than being an orchestra musician and being in the back of a cave with no idea of what’s happening on the stage,” Stutzmann said. “Can you imagine spending three or four hours, five for Wagner, at the bottom of a pit and have no idea what’s happening above you?” Not only can the musicians see this “Zauberflöte”; some also become part of the action.Being positioned higher creates a challenge, though. “We have to be careful not to cover up the singers,” Stutzmann said. “The sound balance is changed because we’re up and above, so we’re louder. You have to be vigilant while avoiding being bland.”Ruth Sullivan, the production’s live Foley artist. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesMuch of the production’s visuals are also created in plain view. The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects — watch how he renders a starry sky — to live projections. “I show all my tricks and then they become doubly magical,” McBurney said with an impish grin.For Levine, making the entire house part of one organism reminds everybody that the artificiality and evanescence of the art form constitute its strength. “What we wanted to do is to bring the audience into the fallibility of theater,” he said. “Things are being made before your eyes, and it’s live, and it’s not going to happen again. And the people that are constructing it are here with you in the same room, and we’re all doing it together.”A scene from the production at the Met.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIf the projections are the modern equivalent of the magic lanterns developed in the 17th century, McBurney and Levine also came up with a contemporary version of a magic carpet: a central square platform that can transport the characters, but that also suggests the instability they experience. It can go up and down, and it can be inclined as various angles; the singers can scamper on top or scurry below. “It is much more secure when you’re on it,” Morley said. “From afar, it looks terrifying.” Laughing, she allowed that “when we go underneath the platform, there were a few moments in rehearsal when I said, ‘You want me to do what?’”Some modern directors have been criticized for overemphasizing an opera’s staging over its music, and forcing interpretations that depart from the familiar. But McBurney’s North Star remains the music, and trying to stay faithful to what it meant for its creator.“I think that for Mozart, if you can make music so beautiful, people will come out changed,” he said. “We can debate whether he was right or not well, but it’s called ‘The Magic Flute.’ The flute changes the way that people behave.”Mozart, he added, had confidence in his music: “He knew that it could move people in a way that might alter their lives.” More

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      A Six-Hour Opera Goes On for One Euphoric Night Only

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      “Stranger Love,” a singular and hypnotic work by Dylan Mattingly and Thomas Bartscherer, opens (and closes) on Saturday in Los Angeles.Years ago, when the composer Dylan Mattingly was at work on a new project, he wrote to his collaborator, Thomas Bartscherer, telling him, “I often find that *really* long is better than just long.”Mattingly followed his own advice — and then some. “Stranger Love,” a singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic opera that he and Bartscherer first envisioned 11 years ago, eventually grew to six hours, well past the point at which people start calling something impossible to produce.“We went into it thinking it would never happen, because how could it?” Mattingly, 32, said in a recent interview.Chunks of the piece have been performed in concert. But on Saturday — for the first time, and for one performance only — the whole thing will be staged at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which has embraced “Stranger Love” as one of its trademark pie-in-the-sky presentations.“Young, emerging artists who have big ideas deserve a place for that work to be seen,” said Chad Smith, the Philharmonic’s chief executive. “If the big institutions are not swinging for the rafters, why are we here?”David Bloom, who founded the group Contemporaneous with Mattingly, rehearsing that ensemble in New York.Michael George for The New York TimesDirected by Lileana Blain-Cruz and played by Contemporaneous — the ensemble Mattingly founded as an undergraduate at Bard College with David Bloom, who will conduct — “Stranger Love” is not exactly Puccini, even if it does sketch a kind of love story. Largely abstract and intensely earnest, slowly telescoping into the cosmic sphere, it offers a heightened experience more than it does a concrete plot.“The mood of the piece is something special,” said the composer John Adams, long a friend and mentor to Mattingly. “I believe the length of it is part of its spiritual — what can I say? — its spiritual impetus.”“Stranger Love” recalls two other operas that sustain a time-suspending tone of meditative ecstasy for many hours, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s “Einstein on the Beach” and Olivier Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise.” Its sensibility was shaped by a CD Mattingly grew up with that featured the Tahitian Choir: “this glorious, polyphonic, joyous sound,” he said, “that’s moving around itself and congealing and drifting apart.” The early Minimalism of Glass is there, too, in the score’s vast expanses of shifting harmonies and repeating rhythms.Mattingly observing a rehearsal of “Stranger Love,” which has been presented in fragments but never in its entirety.Michael George for The New York TimesThree pianos, each tuned slightly differently, give a woozy, honky-tonk feel to some of the music, and sometimes offer a clangorous evocation of gamelan, a tie to the open-eared, pan-Pacific California spirit of Harry Partch and Lou Harrison.There’s some of the lush overripeness of Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” and the billowing fragrance of Debussy. And echoes of the stylized approach to character and the deceptively simple, sometimes almost childlike sound world of Meredith Monk’s wordless opera “Atlas,” which Mattingly said he listened to every night (literally) for a year before he began “Stranger Love.”His piece seems to float above the current-events themes of so much in new music. “It’s not telling you who to vote for or where to stand on an issue,” Bartscherer said, “but it’s asking that you imagine a world that could be otherwise.”“I also think the dedication to joy is an interesting politics,” Blain-Cruz said. “The dedication to fighting for the beauty in life, for people to see that and appreciate it. Like, don’t kill our world; let’s see it in its splendor and see that it’s worth fighting for.”Bartscherer’s spare text manages references to Anne Carson, Octavio Paz and Matthew Arnold, among others. A writer, translator and scholar, he was among Mattingly’s first professors at Bard, and quickly became a fan of Contemporaneous after its founding in 2010. Leaving one of the group’s concerts, Bartscherer had a vague idea for a piece of music theater: There would be two voices in love whose relationship develops, facing symbolic conflict from within and without, before resolving, all during a cycle of the four seasons.He shared the notion with Mattingly, who had been composing since he was 6 but had been wanting to try writing vocal music. Passing material back and forth, they were soon off to the races; the two talk about “Stranger Love” almost as something that already existed complete, in some realm, needing to be discovered or channeled more than consciously created.After the nearly four-hour first act of “Stranger Love,” the voices gradually drop out, with the instrumentalists broadening the work’s scope to the cosmos.Michael George for The New York Times“It was there, somewhere,” Bartscherer said. “And Dylan’s antenna was hearing it somehow.”At a certain point, they abandoned trying to corral the project into a traditionally manageable length, embracing the kind of epic world-building that Mattingly loved in “The Lord of the Rings” and “Battlestar Galactica.” On a 2014 visit to Point Reyes, on the California coast, Mattingly had a vision: The already sprawling score that he and Bartscherer had been working on was just Act I.In this new conception, two more acts would follow, in which the voices would gradually drop out and the opera’s scope would expand to encompass, first, human lovers beyond the initial pair, and then the expanding universe.It took years to finish, even given Mattingly’s single-minded focus. “Sometimes you have students, and you talk to them, and it takes two years to know that what you’re talking about got into their daily life,” said the composer David Lang, one of Mattingly’s teachers during graduate school at Yale. “But he made music so fluidly, and in such a dedicated fashion, that everything we were talking about immediately came out in the work.”Mattingly and Bartscherer briefly thought about producing “Stranger Love” themselves, perhaps in an airplane hangar, but it was clear the cost would be prohibitive without an institutional partner. There were a lot of ignored emails from arts organizations; some who replied said that they couldn’t say yes without seeing it first.Rehearsals have been leading to a single performance in Los Angeles, with none currently planned beyond that.Michael George for The New York TimesA concert performance of the nearly four-hour first act, presented by Beth Morrison and the Prototype festival in 2018, proved the material’s viability — to its creators, at least. But it was only when Adams encouraged Smith of the Los Angeles Philharmonic to take a look at the score, and Mattingly began to send along recorded clips, that “Stranger Love,” long finished, was ex post facto commissioned by the Philharmonic for a staged production.Blain-Cruz said that her staging aimed to be “both super simple and super grand,” with projections (designed by Hannah Wasileski) that evoke the natural world and beyond. Chris Emile’s choreography has been inspired by the cyclical movements of the planets and seasons.“Chris as a choreographer is someone who’s tapped into — not lightly or glibly, but tapped into spirit,” Blain-Cruz said. “All of his physical work, it reaches levels of possession in some ways. Dylan mentions gospel music and spiritual music, riling people up to make themselves open. And I think the choreography matches that.”Will “Stranger Love” have a life beyond Saturday? Mattingly has dreamed of doing it at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. But in the meantime, he and Bartscherer are already at work on another project. They claim that it will be shorter, but the title — “History of Life” — doesn’t give the sense that their scope has gotten any less ambitious.“I did voice my concern,” Adams said, “that Dylan was creating a body of work that was always going to be a challenge to produce. And then I felt like a terrible old dad, like, ‘Are you going to get a job?’ He’s willing to just live an extremely modest life, absolutely devoted to his art.” More

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      The Los Angeles Opera, Post-Plácido Domingo

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      LOS ANGELES — When the tenor Russell Thomas appeared at the Los Angeles Opera in 2017, Plácido Domingo, the company’s general director, asked him to return one day to sing the title role in Verdi’s “Otello.” It was a notable invitation coming from Domingo, the leading Otello of his day, who sang the role in 1986 at the very first performance of the Los Angeles company.Six years later, Thomas is back in Los Angeles starring as Otello in a six-performance run that begins Saturday. But Domingo, who had initially contemplated singing opposite him as the opera’s villain, Iago, is gone, having resigned in 2019 at the age of 78 amid allegations that he had sexually harassed multiple women over the course of his career.So it is that the company’s season-ending production of “Otello” is at once a look back to its foundations and a glimpse into its future, as the Los Angeles Opera charts its course in a post-Domingo era at a moment when it faces the same challenges as other companies in recovering from the loss of audience members and revenues since the pandemic.“It’s slow — it’s much slower than I would have desired,” Christopher Koelsch, the company’s president and chief executive officer, said of the audience’s return. But he noted that attendance was in line with what other opera houses across the country were seeing these days, and that there were signs that the company was overcoming its recent setbacks. “By most criteria, other than audience attendance, the company is in significantly better shape than it’s been in its 38-year history,” he said.Christopher Koelsch, the company’s president and chief executive officer, has been programming new work alongside the classics to reach new audiences.Damon Casarez for The New York TimesAttendance so far this season has averaged 64 percent of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s 3,033-seat capacity — still short of the 83 percent the company logged in 2018-2019, but showing improvement since it first reopened after the shutdown. Two productions that sold well, and sometimes sold out, reflected the company’s efforts to balance new works with the classics: “Omar,” the new Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels opera based on the autobiography of an enslaved Muslim scholar that won the Pulitzer Prize for music this week, and “The Marriage of Figaro,” the Mozart comedy.In a season when the Metropolitan Opera in New York was forced to dip into its endowment to make up for declining revenues, the Los Angeles Opera’s endowment is at a record high — $74.1 million, up from $28.8 million in 2012 — reflecting a continued influx of contributions, said Keith Leonard, the chairman of its board. It survived the downturn without running a deficit, relying on salary reductions, a handful of layoffs, a $5 million five-year loan against the endowment, and federal aid.Domingo’s downfall stunned Los Angeles and its opera company, which had been so closely identified with the star tenor, who had been singing there since the 1960s and was instrumental in the creation of the company. An investigation by the Los Angeles Opera found accusations that he had engaged in “inappropriate conduct” with women “to be credible,” but did not find evidence that he had engaged in “a quid pro quo or retaliated against any woman by not casting or otherwise hiring her at L.A. Opera.” When he left, the company pledged to strengthen its measures for preventing misconduct.It is difficult to say precisely whether attendance was affected by the departure of Domingo, given that the coronavirus shutdown followed so soon afterward. For many years his performances had drawn the biggest crowds, and his image was as integral to the company’s marketing as Gustavo Dudamel’s is for its neighbor, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “It is unmistakably a loss because he’s such a titanic figure in the world,” Koelsch said. But, he added, “a scientific controlled experiment is impossible here.”The opera never filled the general director position after Domingo left; those responsibilities were picked up by Koelsch, who already was running its day-to-day operations.Domingo, in an email interview, said that in his view, the company had continued to thrive even after what he made clear was his unhappy departure from a position that had been a high point of his career.Rachel Willis-Sørensen as Desdemona, Thomas as Otello, Sarah Saturnino as Emilia and Igor Golovatenko as Iago during a rehearsal for “Otello.”Damon Casarez for The New York Times“I saw it grow and I believe that I gave it my all, to the point that it became one of the leading opera houses in the U.S. and the world,” he said, adding: “I see the programming and the seasons appear to be very diverse, with a big focus on new works that can attract new audiences and I think this is a great added value for all the people of Los Angeles.”With a $44 million operating budget, the Los Angeles Opera is the fifth largest company in the United States. Despite its (by opera standards) short existence, and with its modest roster of six productions a season (compared with 23 this season at the Met), it has been establishing itself as one of the more adventurous mainstream opera houses in the country: working to be more edgy than stuffy.Even before Domingo left, the company — aware of his age, and that an institution should not be too closely tied to any one person — had been planning for its future, working to forge an identity that would combine war horses with more contemporary work.For a decade it has been working with Beth Morrison Projects, which has been at the vanguard of producing contemporary opera: they collaborated on the world premiere of Ellen Reid’s opera “p r i s m” in 2018 at Los Angeles’ smaller Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, or REDCAT, and the work won a Pulitzer Prize. And in 2020, “Eurydice,” by Matthew Aucoin, who was then the opera’s artist-in-residence, had its world premiere at the Dorothy Chandler before moving to the Metropolitan Opera.“L.A. Opera is doing very, very well,” said Marc A. Scorca, the president of Opera America, a nonprofit service organization for opera companies. “Of all the major companies in the country, it is the youngest and is still discovering new audiences and new momentum as L.A. continues to build out its cultural infrastructure. I am very optimistic about the company.”James Conlon, the music director, said that the company has work to do to regain its audience after the pandemic.Damon Casarez for The New York TimesThis spring, it collaborated with Beth Morrison Projects to present two operas by Emma O’Halloran, the Irish composer, at the 250-seat black box theater inside REDCAT.One of them, a 70-minute, two-person work called “Trade,” explores an emotionally unsettling hotel room liaison in working-class Dublin between an older married man and a younger male prostitute, hardly the kind of story that has historically been presented on the opera stage.“When we started this relationship, most opera companies were not doing new work,” Morrison said. “L.A. Opera, in terms of the big companies, was very much ahead of the curve on that. They believe in experimental work, and they believe we need to have these things to make sure that opera evolves into the future and brings in new audiences.”Now other large companies, including the Met, are programming more new works in hopes of attracting new audiences.If this is a recovery, it is still a tentative one; crucial questions about how audience behavior has changed remain to be answered. James Conlon, who has been the opera’s music director since 2006, after being recruited for the job by Domingo, said that the opera was “working very hard to regain that audience.”“My own suspicion,” he said, “is that a lot of the competition is not going to be other venues but people who are sitting home who became used to making more use of their televisions.”With “Otello,” the company is returning to the work it opened with in 1986.Damon Casarez for The New York TimesThat is a particular issue in Los Angeles, considering the early evening traffic that can make trips downtown to the Music Center an exhausting, hourslong adventure.When the company was first formed, there was much talk about whether Los Angeles had an appetite for grand opera. “Up until the early 80s the received opinion by many of the leading figures at the Music Center was that ‘L.A. is not an opera town’ and ‘L.A. can afford a great symphony or a great opera, but not both,’” said Don Franzen, an original member of the opera’s board of directors.But 38 years after that opening night, that question appears to have been answered.“Los Angeles is very much an opera town — I see the growth of the company and its success as a testimony to that,” Scorca, of Opera America, said.Now Thomas, the company’s current artist-in-residence, is getting ready to take his place singing the demanding role that launched the company: Otello. He recalled that invitation from Domingo, who had floated the idea of appearing with him in the lower-lying baritone role of Iago, since he had stopped singing high tenor roles.“He was very interested in my singing Otello, and he and I performing the show together,” Thomas said the other day. “I would have loved that to happen. I would have loved to be onstage with one of the legendary singers in opera. Things happen the way they do.” More

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      Grace Bumbry, Barrier-Shattering Opera Diva, Is Dead at 86

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      A flamboyant mezzo-soprano (who could also sing meaty soprano roles), she overcame racial prejudice to become one of opera’s first, and biggest, Black stars.Grace Bumbry, a barrier-shattering mezzo-soprano whose vast vocal range and transcendent stage presence made her a towering figure in opera and one of its first, and biggest, Black stars, died on Sunday in Vienna. She was 86.Her death, following a stroke in October, was confirmed in a statement by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she was long a mainstay, performing more than 200 times over two decades.Growing up in St. Louis in an era of segregation, Ms. Bumbry came of age at a time when African American singers were a rare sight on the opera stage, despite breakthroughs by luminaries like Leontyne Price and Marian Anderson.But with a fierce drive and an outsize charisma, Ms. Bumbry broke out internationally in 1960, at 23, when she sang Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Paris Opera.The following year, she landed in something of a national scandal in West Germany when Wieland Wagner, a grandson of Richard Wagner, cast her as Venus, the Roman goddess of love, in a modernized version of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the storied Bayreuth Festival.She was the first Black woman to perform at the festival, cast as a character typically portrayed as a Nordic ideal in an opera written by a composer known for his antisemitism and German nationalism. The festival — and newspapers — were flooded with letters asserting that the composer would “turn in his grave.”Ms. Bumbry was undeterred. Indeed, she was well prepared.“Everything that I had learned from my childhood was now being tested,” she recalled in an interview with St. Louis Magazine in 2021. “Because I remember being discriminated against in the United States, so why should it be any different in Germany?”The audience did not share such misgivings: Ms. Bumbry was showered with 30 minutes of applause. German critics were equally enchanted, christening her “the Black Venus.” The Cologne-area newspaper Kölnische Rundschau credited her with an “artistic triumph,” and Die Welt called her a “big discovery.”Her landmark performance helped earn her a $250,000 contract (the equivalent of more than $2.5 million now) with the opera impresario Sol Hurok.Ms. Bumbry performed at the White House in 1962, invited by the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, on the advice of European friends who had seen her at Bayreuth.Cecil Stoughton/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumIt also won her another honor: a performance at the White House, in February 1962. On the advice of European friends who had seen Ms. Bumbry at Bayreuth, Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady, invited her to sing at a state dinner attended by President John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren and other Washington power brokers.Suddenly, she was a star.“If there is a more exciting new voice than Grace Bumbry’s skyrocketing over the horizon I have not heard it,” Claudia Cassidy wrote in The Chicago Tribune in a review of a recording of her arias the same year. “This is a glorious voice, by grace of the gods given its chance to be heard in its fullest beauty.”Of her Carnegie Hall debut in November 1962, Alan Rich of The New York Times gave a qualified review, but allowed that “Miss Bumbry has a gorgeous, clear, ringing voice and a great deal of control over it.”“She can swoop without the slightest effort from a brilliant high to a beautiful resonant chest tone,” he wrote.Ms. Bumbry transcended not only racial perceptions but vocal categorizations as well. Originally a mezzo-soprano, she made a striking departure by taking on soprano parts, too, which gave her access to marquee roles in operas such as Richard Strauss’s “Salome” and Puccini’s “Tosca.”“She gloried in the fact that she was able to perform both roles in Verdi’s ‘Aïda,’” Fred Plotkin wrote in a 2013 appreciation for the website for WXQR, the New York public radio station. “She could be Tosca and Salome, but also Carmen and Eboli.”Ms. Bumbry appearing in the 1968 film of Bizet’s opera “Carmen.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMs. Bumbry displayed a broad range in her choice of roles. In 1985, she received raves for her performance as Bess in the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th anniversary performance of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” despite her conflicted feelings about a folk opera set among the tenements of Charleston, S.C., and rife with unflattering Black stereotypes.“I thought it beneath me,” she said in an interview with Life magazine. “I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.”Grace Melzia Bumbry was born on Jan. 4, 1937, in St. Louis, the youngest of three children of Benjamin Bumbry, a railroad freight handler, and Melzia Bumbry, a schoolteacher.A musical prodigy as a youth, she honed her skills in the choir at St. Louis Union Memorial Church and by performing Chopin on the piano at ladies’ tea parties. At 16, she saw a performance by Ms. Anderson, who would become a mentor, and was inspired to enter a singing contest on a local radio station. She took top prize, which included a $1,000 war bond and a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music. She was nonetheless denied admission because of her race.“The reality was wounding,” Ms. Bumbry said in an interview with The Boston Globe. “But when it happened, I also thought, I’m the winner. Nothing can change that. My talent is superior.”Ms. Bumbry sang the national anthem at the Kennedy Center Honors gala in Washington in 2009. She was an honoree that year.Alex Brandon/Associated PressEmbarrassed, the radio contest organizers arranged for her to appear on “Talent Scouts,” a national radio and television program hosted by Arthur Godfrey. After hearing her heart-rending performance of “O Don Fatale,” from Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” the avuncular Mr. Godfrey informed the audience, “Her name will be one of the most famous names in music one day.”The exposure helped put her on a path to Boston University, and later, Northwestern University, where she fell under the tutelage of the German opera luminary Lotte Lehmann, who became another valuable mentor as Ms. Bumbry moved toward her debut in Paris.As her star continued to rise over the years, Ms. Bumbry was never afraid to inhabit the prima donna role offstage as well as on, outfitting herself in Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta and tooling around in a Lamborghini.After marrying the tenor Erwin Jaeckel in 1963, she settled in a villa in Lugano, Switzerland. The couple divorced in 1972. Ms. Bumbry left no immediate survivors.Beyond her prodigious vocal skills, Ms. Bumbry brought a famous sultriness to her roles, a reputation she put to good use for a 1970 performance of “Salome” at the Royal Opera House in London.She leaked word to the press that for the racy “Dance of the Seven Veils,” she would strip off all seven veils, down to her “jewels and perfume,” as she put it — although the jewels, it turned out, were sufficient enough to serve as a “modest bikini,” as The New York Times noted.It hardly mattered. “In the history of Covent Garden,” Ms. Bumbry said in a 1985 interview with People magazine, “they never sold so many binoculars.” More

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      Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels Win the Pulitzer Prize for Music

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      Giddens said that the success of their opera “Omar” proves that “nobody has the lock on being a composer.”“I mean, look: I’m bowled over right now,” the polymathic musician Rhiannon Giddens said from her home in Ireland on Monday, shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize for music.She was speaking in a phone interview with the composer Michael Abels, who joined separately by phone from the United States. Together, they wrote the Pulitzer-winner, “Omar,” an opera about Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim scholar who was captured in Africa in the early 1800s and sold into slavery in Charleston, S.C. It was there that the work premiered last May, at Spoleto Festival USA.Giddens wrote the libretto based on Said’s autobiography, and recorded self-accompanied demos that Abels then responded to with a fleshed-out score. The result was a multigenre, multicultural swirl — a tour through the sound worlds of Islam, bluegrass, spirituals and more — that I described in my review of the premiere as “an unforced ideal of American sound: expansive and ever-changing.”Abels has written for concert halls and films, including the “Get Out” soundtrack. Giddens is most famous as a folk musician but trained as a classical singer and has dipped her toes into opera in recent years, hosting the podcast “Aria Code” and performing works by John Adams. And now, to accolades like Grammy Awards and a MacArthur “genius” grant, Giddens, who never studied composition, can add the Pulitzer.“Nobody has the lock on being a composer,” she said. “We’ve got to stop with separation and who gets to be called a composer. There are a bunch of people who could write the next ‘Omar.’”In the interview, during which their phones could be heard ringing with calls and congratulations, Giddens and Abels reflected more on the creation of their opera and looked ahead to its future and theirs. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Where are your heads right now?RHIANNON GIDDENS It feels amazing, because Michael and I just put into this what we know. It was a love letter to my country. There’s so much to hate about it, but what I love about it is that ability that people have to come together and make some new amazing thing. American music is a spectrum.MICHAEL ABELS It shows the importance of telling all of our stories through our fine art, that people are waking up to the truth of that statement and the importance of our stories’ being part of our full artistic legacy. I’ve just come from seeing a couple of the shows in Boston, where it was playing to sold-out houses [at Boston Lyric Opera]. In each city, you’ve seen people who have never come to the opera before, feeling seen and feeling moved and being welcomed into an artistic space where they haven’t felt welcomed before.Rather than following the traditional route of a dramatic ending, the opera winds down with a communal, spiritual experience. Can you talk about why?GIDDENS There was a lot of instinctual writing. If you’d asked me this as I was writing the ending, I’d say, “I don’t know, I just need to do it this way.” Because the autobiography is so scant on details, I knew immediately that having a conventional narrative was not going to work.There have been American operas dealing with very American topics, but for African Americans, we had “Porgy and Bess.” It’s a beautiful opera, but now we’re starting to tell our stories. And we have to think about the story we’re telling, and how we want the audience to walk out of the theater. The end had to be about him and his faith, and it had to be about healing.ABELS It didn’t occur to me that it was unusual, that the first part was narrative and the last part wasn’t. Everything ended up where it needed to be. As a performing artist, [Rhiannon] constructs evenings for audiences all the time. I think her understanding that we need to take care of the audience at the end of this work comes from her being a performer.GIDDENS It shows that you don’t have to do it the same way everybody does it. I have not taken one composition class in my entire life. But I’ve lived composition in a different way.What does the future hold for this opera?GIDDENS The Ojai Music Festival commissioned a shorter concert version of “Omar.” And I’m going to be bold and say that I hope today pushes us to a recording. That would be my dream.And for you two as collaborators?ABELS Rhiannon is the most talented person I know, in terms of the variety and breadth of talent, and I’m thrilled to be part of her musical life.GIDDENS I’m not even blowing smoke when I say I don’t know what angel whispered Michael’s name — well, I do, because it was his soundtrack to “Get Out.” But I didn’t know what would happen. I had an instinct that it would work, and I don’t know how I lucked out so much in finding a collaborator. I can’t imagine us not doing more together. Watch this space. More

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      Mo Willems Finds Yet Another Way to Entertain Kids: Opera

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      The beloved author of children’s books is experimenting with new forms, alongside starry collaborators, at the Kennedy Center.WASHINGTON — Do you know the words to the Queen of the Night’s stratospheric showcase from “The Magic Flute”? Maybe the Duke’s famous tune from “Rigoletto”? Carmen’s Habanera?No, not those words. The other ones: the words, at least, as they are now known to my 6-year-old daughter and the hundreds of children who took grown-ups like me to the Kennedy Center here recently for the premiere of “The Ice Cream Truck Is Broken! & Other Emotional Arias,” an experiment, including a short new work by the composer Carlos Simon, in what it might mean to draw a very young and impossibly demanding audience into a life in opera.See, you might think that Carmen is relating her views on love, but no. Listen closely, and you’ll find that the singer should have shared her cotton candy with her friends, and absolutely will … tomorrow. “La donna è mobile”? That’s about how milk squirts out your nose if you happen to laugh at exactly the wrong time. The Queen’s aria? That’s still about anger, but it now invokes something far worse than the vengeance of hell.“This bicycle,” it begins, in a fit of preschool pique, “is such a poo-poo vehicle.”The director Felicia Curry, left, with Willems during a rehearsal for “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!,” a short new opera created with the composer Carlos Simon.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesWillems and Simon reunited after their first opera effort, “SLOPERA!,” also at the Kennedy Center.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesOpera’s great composers have a new librettist, and he is almost certainly the only person who could induce an institution like the Kennedy Center to do something like this, let alone get Renée Fleming to join him in hosting it; inspire a quintet of young singers to ham their way through it; and persuade Simon, one of the busiest composers around, to crown the show with a 20-minute piece that gives an attention-seeking, picture-book Pigeon the prima donna spotlight it has surely always craved.The writer for it all? Mo Willems, who, it turns out, really loves opera!“The commonalities between what my industry, or my main industry, does and what opera does are incredible,” said Willems, a six-time Emmy Award-winning former Sesame Street writer, who has earned three Caldecott Honors for picture books and reigns as a near-deity in children’s literature.“It’s big emotions,” he added during an interview at the Kennedy Center before the premiere. “It’s direct communication. It’s interior dialogue. It’s self-discovery. And both forms really have been pushed off to the side of the mainstream, and I think that they have more power that way.”WILLEMS HAS ALWAYS BEEN a broader artist than just a writer of picture books, though that task alone is such that he calls it “as easy as describing the history of Byzantium in three words.” Some of his most celebrated characters — who include a venturesome plushie called Knuffle Bunny, the on-and-off best friends Elephant and Piggie, and that insatiable, inimitable Pigeon — had already starred in musicals that he had written before he formalized his long association with the Kennedy Center in 2019, when he became its education artist in residence. That three-year position coincided with the pandemic, to which he responded with invaluable “Lunch Doodles” videos, but it still let him explore a range of genres, including symphonic music, which he said “has always been important to me.”“Beethoven’s Fifth is the easiest example,” he explained, “but it’s basically the arc of an episode of television, or a movie: ‘Ba-ba-ba-baaam,’ oh, it’s exciting — and then you take the theme, you take the theme, and then you build with it. So when I was writing a show called ‘Codename: Kids Next Door,’ which is a silly sort of action comedy, I would literally write to the symphony.”Siphokazi Molteno, left, during a rehearsal for “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesA rehearsal for “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!,” which is based on Willems’s book “Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesFor the National Symphony Orchestra, Willems painted giant abstractions to accompany a cycle of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, and he worked with the musician Ben Folds to adapt one of his books, “Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs,” for the concert hall. Hearing plans for “Goldilocks” led Tim O’Leary, the general director of the Washington National Opera and a Willems-reading father of three, to inquire about a commission.At their first meeting, Willems was “feigning ignorance” about opera, O’Leary recalled, but the author quickly sent him a copy of an Elephant and Piggie book — “I Really Like Slop!” — with the inscription “Tim, this book really sings.” By their second encounter, Willems had the libretto in his head, a sketch of the characters in concert dress and a title: “SLOPERA!”“Obviously, once it was called the ‘SLOPERA!’ we had to do it,” O’Leary said.Willems says that opera is similar to picture books in that in both cases, the text cannot stand on its own.Lexey Swall for The New York Times“SLOPERA!” could only be performed live outdoors on account of the pandemic, but an indoor recording, with piano accompaniment, was shown virtually to more than 300,000 schoolchildren.” Piggie gets Gerald the Elephant to try slop, a stinky green delicacy among porcine foodies. He does, after his initial refusals upset his companion, and he endures the consequences in something like a bel canto mad (or death) scene. He recovers, though, and tells Piggie that while he might not like her food, he still likes her. Scored cutely by Simon, it is funny, catchy and in the end moving, a paean to friendship and trying new things.“Everything that I do as a picture book writer is reductive,” Willems said, reflecting on what writing his first libretto taught him, aside from the importance of placing consonants carefully. “If you look at a picture book manuscript, and you can understand it, it has too many words. If you look at just the illustrations, and you can understand it, the drawings are too detailed. They both have to be incomprehensible. It’s very similar with writing an opera, that the words that you’re using have to be dependent on the music, but the music has to be dependent on the words, and either of them shouldn’t really be able to stand alone.”WILLEMS CAUGHT THE opera bug and started planning a follow-up, “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!,” which O’Leary said was initially conceived as a monodrama for the inquisitive, intransigent Pigeon — akin to an avian “Erwartung.” Deborah Rutter, the Kennedy Center’s president, also suggested that Willems collaborate with Fleming, the center’s artistic adviser at large.Fleming sent Willems reams of classic arias to listen to, select from and rewrite to fit how kids might experience emotions like joy, disgust or shame. “They are sung beautifully,” Fleming said of the results. “They are sung in all seriousness. It’s just the text. A, it’s in English, and B, it’s really devised for 6-year-olds.”Curry, center, preparing the premiere of “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesSimon, right, the composer of “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesSmushed together under the title “The Ice Cream Truck Is Broken!” so that nine rewritten arias surrounded the Pigeon opera, the hourlong show ended up being a bit of a mishmash, as if the remarkable sum of resources being drawn from all over the Kennedy Center — not least, its comedy budget — were being thrown around to see what stuck.The arias didn’t quite land, to judge by the polite but not thrilled reactions of the children sitting near me. Dressed to the nines, Willems and Fleming introduced them, laboring over a running joke about an “opera song” really being called an “aria.” Felicia Curry, a leading Washington actress, directed with a light touch, sharing with her collaborators a faith in the music itself to connect. Though the early-career singers — Suzannah Waddington, Siphokazi Molteno, Oznur Tuluoglu, Jonathan Pierce Rhodes, Shea Owens — were amplified and could not possibly have sung more clearly or enthusiastically, it was still hard for my young assistant either to follow the lyrics with her ears, or to sound out the supertitles in time. I found some of the texts ingenious, but it all felt a bit too earnest, too consciously instructional to inspire.She was there, in any case, to see a bird sing; and sing the Pigeon did. After eight of the arias and a fair bit of fidgeting came the Willems-Simon piece, which is based on “Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late!,” a past-bedtime classic in which the Pigeon works through a repertoire of tactics to ward off sleepy time. Tuluoglu, a young soprano whose most recent prior role was Barbarina at the Annapolis Opera, took on the title character. “When you train, you have to be able to sing Mozart, you gotta be able to be a pigeon,” she said before the show.Willems adds two cousins to the Pigeon’s flock, and in turn the pajama-clad birds try out a trio of techniques — “Negotiation,” “Guilt” and “Tantrum,” as their arias are called — on an audience that is encouraged to yell back in denial. Simon’s score is a delight, propulsive and charming with a swishing jazz number and a lullaby ripped from Brahms. The kids enjoyed it, and so did the adults.Now, Willems hopes to write the libretto of a full-scale opera.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesTHE HOLY GRAIL of so-called family or education programming must surely be something along those lines, but in the experience of this frustrated musical parent, the recipe is often wrong. Willems and his collaborators understand the same thing as their goal, although as the author said, “no one is a true expert in children’s, Al Yankovic-ing, spoofing opera pieces.” Experimentation is required.“You have to approach it with all the same seriousness” as a main-stage opera, O’Leary said, “and get all the greatest people involved, because actually kids are the toughest audience, the most discerning, and if you can make it work, then you know you’ve got something.”Willems has long written books that transcend generational divides: my children love them because they are silly, and I love them because they make me a sillier father than I would ever be without one in my hand. As a librettist — a description that must now be added to all his other job titles, as he enjoys the collaborative nature of opera so much that he hopes to write a full-scale piece — he inevitably thinks along the same lines. His arias, he said, were for me and my children alike.“She already thinks it’s cool because it’s great music,” Willems said, nodding to my daughter. “You have a history to it, and by stripping that history away hopefully you’ll listen to it differently. You’re coming into it with preconceived notions, and these guys aren’t, and then there’s somebody in the middle who just, like, saw a lot of Chuck Jones films, and has a vague sense of it.”“I struggle,” he added, “with the idea that a grown-up would bring one of the younger people in their lives, with the expectation that that person is going to learn something, but that the person bringing them isn’t. I want everybody to be open to a new experience.” More